


The Final Journey of Arwen Evenstar

by SpaceWall



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Gen, Grandparents & Grandchildren, Grief/Mourning, he’s not technically there but is talked about enough to count
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-20 11:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30003951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: Arwen knows her death will come in Lothlórien. Before she goes to meet it, there’s one last thing she has to do.--She walked south. There were still a bare few elves clinging to the shore in the north, and it was not their company she sought. She walked in rain, and sleet, until her feet swelled and ached within her shoes, and she kept walking. It was the most mortal Arwen had ever felt, and she loved every miserable second of it, with the gulls for her company and the stars overhead to light her way.
Relationships: Aragorn | Estel/Arwen Undómiel, Arwen Undómiel & Maglor | Makalaurë
Comments: 12
Kudos: 55





	The Final Journey of Arwen Evenstar

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: discussions of canonical character death (Aragorn and Elros), impending character death (Arwen), loss of a child (Elros), and the general sort of sadness you would expect from a fic all about death.

She thought about staying in Minas Tirith. She did not like holding the cowardice of Melian over the courage of Lúthien. But her death did not come on quickly enough. The idea that she might linger, and watch her children die, was too much entirely. 

It was Hestiel who persuaded her to leave. She had come down from Arnor, where she was her brother’s vassal, for the purpose. It seemed to Arwen that she could hardly have returned home from her father’s funeral before she must have set out again. 

Hestiel was, of all her children, the most blunt and the least diplomatic. Perhaps, for that reason, it was easier for her to convey the message than it would have been for her brother, who was like his grandfather in his diplomatic streak. 

“You’re always welcome,” she told Arwen, “but we can all see that you don’t want to be here. We love you far too much to ever wish to see you suffer. Go, and be free of any obligation you feel to us.”

“I can’t be free of any obligation to you. I’m your mother.”

Hestiel rolled her eyes. She had a serious countenance, with thick dark hair just going grey at the temples, which she wore in a tightly woven braid around her head. Even as a girl, she had never been one to accept any sort of nonsense.

“There comes a time in every child’s life when you must let them make their own path. This is a mother’s duty. To guide them to that path, to clothe them for the journey and give whatever supplies you carry. But you cannot walk it with them.”

She had a daughter of her own, a girl of sixteen years, and a son of ten.

“If I go, none of you will see me again in this world.”

Even now, Arwen’s sight had not left her. Hestiel knew that as well. They embraced for a long time, before Hestiel, whispering into her shoulder as she had when she was a girl, said, “go. We’ll see you in the next.”

And so she did. But she told all of them a single lie. She told them that she made her way for Lóthlorien. She would go there, in time. She had once been fated to die there, and was not one to beg any more boons of destiny than she had already received. But it was not her intended destination on the day she set out from Minas Tirith for the last time. Instead, she turned her steed towards the sea, and rode hard until the sound of the gulls was all around. There, as close as she would ever come to the lands where her parents dwelled, she gave the horse to an old woman who was not yet born when Arwen became queen and left on foot.

She walked south. There were still a bare few elves clinging to the shore in the north, and it was not their company she sought. She walked in rain, and sleet, until her feet swelled and ached within her shoes, and she kept walking. It was the most mortal Arwen had ever felt, and she loved every miserable second of it, with the gulls for her company and the stars overhead to light her way.

This was a quirk of destiny, here at the end of her life. Her grandfather, ageless and should have been mortal, was the most resolute companion upon her final journey. Eärendil watched, silent as the stone he bore, and wondered at her destination.

Every step she took was another step she would have to take back, when she went to die in the lands of her mother’s people. But she went anyways.

Arwen, she still called herself in the villages she passed. It was a common name among women from Gondor who were in reality the age she looked. Even here, deep into Harad, they did not bat an eye at it. If they stared, it was because of her wild and terrible beauty, not because they believed her to be the once-queen of Gondor.

She reached her destination in a craggy inlet, lifetimes from the home she had left behind. She knew it by the feeling of magic that absorbed her, so like and unalike her father’s and grandmother’s. She knew it by the certainty in her heart. She knew it by the sound of harpstrings being plucked, music drifting through the evening air and reminding her so strongly of home. 

“Hello,” she said in Sindarin. It was the first word she had spoken in that tongue since Aragorn’s passing. 

The playing stopped, and Maglor stared up at her with a look of genuine surprise. “Forgive me, gentle lady. I had not thought any of the firstborn yet roamed these parts.”

Just to see what he would do, she switched tongues again to Noldorin. “They do not, as far as I am aware. But I think you will find that I am not, in any of the ways that matter, one of your kind.”

The look of recognition on his face was instant, and the look of fear followed it a breath later. “Lady Arwen. Your majesty.”

She offered him a genuine smile, as best she could. “Lord Maglor.”

And she joined him, sitting there on the rock and looking over the sea. The last rays of the sun were sinking over the water. She had always wondered what it would be like, to meet her last remaining grandfather. But now, at his side, everything she had ever planned to say seemed to escape her.

“I’m sorry, about the loss of your husband.”

“So am I.” The gulls and the sea filled her ears. Unlike Legolas, she did not find they exerted any pull over her heart. But they were very beautiful. “I can see how you chose to stay here.”

“I don’t think any elf could truly understand that.”

“Then it’s a good thing I am no elf.” She was unable to keep herself from putting just a bit of Éowyn into her cadence. She’d heard that story far too many times at family parties over the years to avoid it. 

Maglor didn’t have the context to understand her joke. Arwen contented herself with the knowledge that Aragorn and Faramir both would have laughed with her, and Éowyn would have blushed and given some witty retort.

“Are you enjoying it, your mortality?”

In all her years, she thought her husband was the only person to ever have asked that question. 

“Not particularly, at this moment. I suppose you know what it’s like, to lose someone who is as a part of yourself.” Maglor had been married, once, not that the stories even cared to remember her name. Arwen only knew it because her father had told her: Celumë. “But over the term of my life? I wouldn’t give up my life here for a thousand years in the blessed realm. I love my husband, and I love my children, and I would not wish to be sundered from them.”

“And your family on the far shore?

One of the only true regrets of Arwen’s life was that she had never been able to say goodbye to her mother. “I miss them. Of course I do. But my life is here, and I hope they love me enough to forgive me for the way we have been parted.”

Her grandfather was looking out to the sea, with a naked expression of longing on his face. In that moment, she pitied him terribly. “I’m sure they will. They have. It is the duty of a parent to know that they must allow their children to choose. Even if it is not that which they would have chosen for themselves.”

“Did you forgive Elros?”

He started at that. “You mistake me for Eärendil.”

“I think that would be a very difficult mistake to make.” They were still a while, as crickets began to sound their song in the evening air, before she said, “you speak well of parenthood, for one who professes to have no children.”

This close, Arwen could see the slight tremor in his hands, where they grasped tight around his harp. It looked to be of mannish make, and not so ancient as all that. She wondered what the men of Far Harad thought of him, when this strange, ancient being walked in their midst. 

“Of course I forgave him,” Maglor said, which served as his admission that Arwen had been right. “I was unspeakably proud of him, every day of his life, even if I had no right to be.”

And this, this was why Arwen had walked all this way. Her sundering from her mother could not be remedied, nor Maglor’s from his son. But they were still here, in the long shadow of such terrible loss. 

“He knew. Even if you never said it in as many words.”

“And did your father?”

“I’m sure he could stand to be reminded of it, when you can bear the journey.”

He turned to look at her, and she found herself mesmerized by the light in his eyes, which she had only seen before in her grandmother. Even Glorfindel, who had seen Valinor, had been reborn without the trees reflected in his eyes. They were extraordinary to look at, a mesmerizing effervescence that made him seem remarkably alive in a way elves so rarely did.

“He may be waiting a very long time.”

“Because you need the time, or because you fear the sea?”

That won a snort of laughter from him, though it was tinged with irony. “It is not the sea that scares me.”

Fair enough. “Which outcome scares you more? That you should die for your actions, or that they might dare to let you pass?”

He turned away from her, back to the water. The tide was encroaching, slowly but surely, upon the shore. 

“Do you think me a coward? Perhaps you should. I am still afraid to die.”

“So am I.” That seemed to genuinely surprise him, and he turned around to look at her. “The gift of man is not a gift imbued with certainty. I know my fate no more than you know your chances of life across the sea. I didn’t choose this because I was unafraid.”

“Then how did you?”

Even now, she found it hard to articulate. It had been impossible to explain at the time, to her father, to Aragorn. “Because it is my life. The good and the bad. Perhaps especially the bad. I chose to live, with all the fear that entails. I didn’t only choose for Aragorn, no matter how much I wanted him. I chose for me. And this is mine. My life and my death. It will come to me. Soon, now that I have completed this penultimate stage in my journey.”

“Then home, to Minas Tirith?”

“North, yes, but to my grandmother’s realm. To fade among the trees. Can you not imagine why I hold some fear for that?”

Though his head was turned to the sea still, Arwen could see that his brows had drawn together. “Is it not the wish of every mortal to die surrounded by their family?”

“Perhaps. But I cannot be sure when I will die. And I will not remain if there is the slightest possibility I will be forced to outlive my children. In this, I share Melian’s cowardice.”

“And loneliness is your choice? Have you no other kin remaining on this shore?”

He probably received little news of elves. “My brothers and my grandfather Celeborn have sailed, three springs past. The last kingdoms of the elves are strangers to me. Círdan and Thranduil both would have me, but I have no wish to die in their company. And, as I have seen it, my fate rests in the Golden Wood. If I flee Lóthlorien, who knows how many years I will linger, hiding from my destiny? That I shall not tolerate.”

Her words had become perhaps a little jumbled, but her sentiment, she hoped, was clear.

Maglor seemed to have closed his eyes as she spoke, almost as if in prayer. “Would you like company? On your journey.”

Even in her old age, she still sometimes found herself startled by the kindness of strangers. Achingly, he reminded her of her father. “Part of this journey, I must make alone.”

“But not all of it.”

He took her hand, and she rested her head upon his shoulder. In the distance the first stars of the evening began to rise. Lifetimes and worlds and oceans away, Elrond Peredhel smiled, for no particular reason at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello my Silm fandom people. Do not think I have abandoned you. I have not, I just have many, many ideas in other fandoms and am multi-tasking. As always, this fandom is one of my first loves and I am grateful to all of you <3\. Comments are love!
> 
> On names: Aragorn and Arwen’s canonical daughters and Maglor’s canonical wife do not have them. Here I have called one of the daughters Hestiel from Hest (s) or Hesto (Q) meaning ‘captain’. Celumë is always my name for Maglor’s wife in my stories and tbch I’ve forgotten what it means. It’s probably buried in the notes to some other story if anyone is burning to know.


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